Marina Tsvetaeva ranks with Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Boris
Pasternak as one of Russia?s greatest twentieth-century poets. Her suicide
at the age of forty-eight was the tragic culmination of a life beset by
loss and hardship. This volume presents in English a collection of essays
published in the Russian emigre press after Tsvetaeva left Moscow in 1922.
Based on diaries she kept from 1917 to 1920, the work describes the broad
social, economic, and cultural chaos provoked by the Bolshevik Revolution.
Events and individuals are seen through the lens of her personal
experience-that of a destitute young woman of upper-class background with
two small children (one of whom died of starvation), a missing husband, and
no means of support other than her poetry. These autobiographical writings
are an eyewitness account of a dramatic period in Russian history, told by
a gifted and outspoken poet.